Good Layman's guide to the financial crisis

[Stevely]

If the powers that be had a clue on what to do with the economic mess, they'd really start focusing on rebuiling the middle class. This, of course, would mean a redistribution of wealth from the upper class downward, but the rich have gotten much richer over the last 30 years.

They'd rather be billionaires in a country of paupers, than mere millionaires in a country with a healthy middle class. We default to thinking people that wealthy and connected take an interest in the stability and health of the society as a whole, but honestly it is getting harder and harder to see signs of any concern beyond maximizing self interest, regardless of the cost to the country.

[Schmedlap]

The chart may show median income among men remaining "relatively" static. I have to wonder if that means anything because standard of living continually improves despite the gloom. Time-saving conveniences, variety of goods, novelty items, infant mortality, life expectancy, quality of health care available, etc, etc. And the safety net ensures a higher standard of living than most of the world's middle class.

Regarding the concern that we are a service-based economy, I think too many people regard this as a bad thing because when they think "service" they think "flipping burgers." College professors, many IT professionals, and private military contractors - just off the top of my head - are part of the service economy and so are other high-skill and/or high paying and/or highly credentialed lines of work. And we're pretty good at drawing people here to spend money on our services (for example, foreign students at our colleges/universities) and in enticing others to pay our people to travel abroad and provide services to them (for example, many oil-producing countries rely on our know-how to help them more efficiently extract their oil).

So manufacturing jobs are going to China and other countries? So what? That's because they're the ones with the less educated workforce that is willing to slave away in lousy working conditions, lower their life expectancies, and receive low pay, just to churn out cheap goods for us to buy while we focus on high-tech, innovative, and high-profit margin technologies and services. If we want to retain manufacturing jobs in this country, then we need to understand that Americans will demand that those manufacturing jobs be safer, cleaner, higher-paying, more environmentally friendly, and more expensive than our market is willing tolerate. Hello, price controls! Not going to happen, nor would it be a good thing if it did. China can have their manufacturing. I'm content to let them manufacture children's toys coated in lead paint and spoiled baby milk while we focus on building military hardware and networking equipment.

[Ski]

Except for one minor issue - it gets exported to the US.

I'm content to let them manufacture children's toys coated in lead paint and spoiled baby milk while we focus on building military hardware and networking equipment.